My son is working on the Grammatica portion of the 1st chapter of the workbook. So far so good until he reached question 20 on syllabification. This exercise requires splitting words into syllables, underlining the long syllable and placing an accent mark on stressed syllables. There are numerous things that have thrown us for a loop but here are the main two:

#1 Why are there accent marks (in the answer key) on the last syllable of three words: antiqua, salvere, and iuvate? From the text we learned that the stress/accent should fall in one of three places - the first syllable, the penult (next to last) if that syllable is long and the word has three or more syllables, or the antepenult (second to last?) syllable if the penult syllable is not long. Are we missing or not understanding something or are there errors in the answer key?

#2 In the word iuvate my son had broken it into syllables that looked like this: i-u-va-te. The workbook had it broken into syllables that looked like this: iu-va-te. I don't think this is a dipthong - 'ui' is a dipthong but not 'iu', correct?

It looks like the words in this exercise aren't following the rules laid out in the text. Any help, corrections, clarifications are very much appreciated!

I'm not a Latinist, but I'll take a stab (having gotten further than this in Wheelock myself).

brighthouse wrote:#1 Why are there accent marks (in the answer key) on the last syllable of three words: antiqua, salvere, and iuvate? From the text we learned that the stress/accent should fall in one of three places - the first syllable, the penult (next to last) if that syllable is long and the word has three or more syllables, or the antepenult (second to last?) syllable if the penult syllable is not long. Are we missing or not understanding something or are there errors in the answer key?

You seem to understand. There shouldn't be stress marks on the last syllable of any of these words.

brighthouse wrote:#2 In the word iuvate my son had broken it into syllables that looked like this: i-u-va-te. The workbook had it broken into syllables that looked like this: iu-va-te. I don't think this is a dipthong - 'ui' is a dipthong but not 'iu', correct?

i is a semi-consonant. In this place, 'iu' is like 'ju' and it's one syllable. iu-va-te, where the first syllable is like writing "you" in English. It's not a diphthong, since the i in this case isn't technically a vowel.

brighthouse wrote:It looks like the words in this exercise aren't following the rules laid out in the text. Any help, corrections, clarifications are very much appreciated!

Hope that helped a little. Now if a real student of Latin would step in and verify, that would be great.

i is a semi-consonant. In this place, 'iu' is like 'ju' and it's one syllable. iu-va-te, where the first syllable is like writing "you" in English. It's not a diphthong, since the i in this case isn't technically a vowel.

Hope that helped a little. Now if a real student of Latin would step in and verify, that would be great.

Verified.

Also, Latin never accents the final syllable... never. I'm not sure what the workbook is trying to say. It seems unlikely to have such a consistent typo. I don't have the workbook or I'd look it up. Anyone else have the workbook and can chime in?

I tried. The accent on the i didn't come out so good. For some reason, the macron shifts right and the accent shifts left. The e and a look OK, I guess. Why don't we have full support for such things already?!?!